I Went Undercover as a Secret OnlyFans Chatter. It Wasn’t Pretty

Brendan Koerner has a long, storied career reporting on stories and characters who feel almost too vivid to be true. For his latest at Wired, though, he turns that formula inside out—and becomes one of the army of hidden support workers who assume the identity of an OnlyFans creator in order to maintain chats with paying subscribers. Hilarious and deeply depressing in nearly equal measure, but never without the empathy that Koerner brings to all his work.

I found it quite easy at first to write the sort of run-of-the-mill smut the Serbs expected. (I’ll spare you the gory details, except to say I cribbed some color from Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fi film Strange Days.) For the less explicit chats, I imagined Miko offering to cook the subscriber a pasta dinner and feigning appreciation for his TV recommendations. I did make one glaring error that could have led to an entire chat being voided as unusable: Due to my hasty misreading of Miko’s bio, I characterized her as a fan of spicy ramen when she actually prefers her food mild. “I have to ask you to pay attention to these little facts,” Daniel wrote in his assessment. “In this case, these lines mentioning the food could have been rejected, and that could have led to the dialog’s rejection.”

But despite that mistake and a few other hiccups—my punctuation seemed unnatural because it was too accurate—Daniel offered me the job. I was to be paid 7 cents per line of dialog, with each dialog running for a minimum of 40 lines. For my first assignment, I had to compose 20 dialogs involving sex in public places—10 at the beach, five inside a car, and five in a forest or garden. There was a list of particular sex acts I had to include, as well as a stricture that I refrain from using emoji in more than 30 percent of lines. I had only 48 hours to complete the task.

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Secret in the Walls: Hidden Letters Reveal Love, Lust, Scandal in 1920s Baltimore Society

Joanna Meade moved into an old house in Baltimore’s Roland Park neighborhood. When they removed a wall during a bathroom renovation, they discovered a black tin box hidden among the plumbing. Inside, she found 67 “juicy turn-of-the-century love letters,” all except one postmarked 1920 or 1921. Tim Prudente and Stokely Baksh recount what Meade, her neighbors, and Baltimore Banner staff pieced together from the correspondence.

A woman in Waverly sent a newspaper article on Dr. Reynold Albrecht Spaeth. The zoologist and Johns Hopkins public health professor was ahead of his time, giving lectures on the merits of birth control and education for women factory workers. By 1920, he was 34 and already renowned in the field of immunology.

The love letters were to his wife, Edith.

What a sweet romance: an esteemed Hopkins scientist, whose research took him away from home, writing love letters back to his wife in Baltimore. Or so it seemed.

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Imagine Your Last Day of Work Ever. Here’s Theirs.

A fabric store owner, a surgeon, a TV-news traffic anchor, a Latin-dance-music D.J., a church organist, a letter carrier, and a firefighter share career highlights and their very last day of work before retirement.

There has always been a certain feeling of euphoria that comes to Tony Pabón as he looks out at the dance floor from his D.J. table at Salsannati Dance Company. “To play music and have people start to clap or move their body or dance — that’s powerful,” he says. “I have to pinch myself sometimes.” So when his job started to feel more like a chore than a joy, Pabón knew it was time to retire. (He will continue working a day job at a bank.) “Lately, I’m not having the passion,” he says. “I’m doing it because it’s my duty.” Besides, standing for four-hour sets was taking a toll on his knees.

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The Drawing the Art Institute Won’t Give Back

Timothy Reif is one the legal heirs of Fritz Grünbaum, an Austrian cabaret performer and art collector who died in the Dachau concentration camp in 1941. Since the 1990s, Reif and his family have been searching for Grünbaum’s collection—more than 400 pieces that had been scattered after the war, including Egon Schiele’s Russian War Prisoner, a drawing that’s worth $1.25 million. For Chicago Magazine, Kelley Engelbrecht writes an important story about contested ownership and the restitution of Nazi-confiscated art.

The meticulous documentation of forced sales of art by Jewish owners to the Nazis created a confusing veneer of legality after the war. In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws had been established to strip Jewish people of basic rights; by 1937, the Nazis had started requiring Jews to declare and register their property. Ultimately, this led to the confiscation and seizure of art, often masked by forced sales and empty promises: “Give us your art and” — in the case of the Gutmanns — “we’ll give you a train ticket out of Nazi Europe.” But, of course, it never went like that. And all that remained was a record that implied decision-making autonomy by the sellers, when in reality their lives had been at stake. In many cases, the proceeds from a sale were put into a bank account that would, in the end, be frozen.

The question I keep returning to, the one that I can’t shake, is if any of this truly matters. I know the answer is yes. That it matters if the collection was stolen or if it was lawfully sold to Kornfeld by Lukacs or if too much time has passed to do anything about it. But I can’t stop thinking about the simple truth that precedes all this complexity: that a terrible, tragic thing happened to innocent people. And if that terrible, tragic thing hadn’t happened, Grünbaum would have retained the agency to do what he’d like with his art.

The simple truths are often the hardest to acknowledge, and perhaps that’s why we make them complex. But what I know is that this story, as it seeks truth, is itself built on a series of simple truths: Art went missing. The people who know how Russian War Prisoner ended up in Chicago are now all dead. And the man who first loved the portrait, who hung it on his wall, was murdered. We don’t know definitively what happened between 1938 and 1956, and we may never know.

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A British Nurse Was Found Guilty of Killing Seven Babies. Did She Do It?

Colleagues reportedly called Lucy Letby an “angel of death,” and the prime minister condemned her. But in the rush to judgment, serious questions about the evidence against her were ignored. The incomparable Rachel Aviv on a case that shocked the United Kingdom—but perhaps for the wrong reasons:

The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”

But the chart didn’t account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country’s most reviled woman—“the unexpected face of evil,” as the British magazine Prospect put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.

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Acid Media

When LSD first hit the counterculture in the 1960, it was ingested via sugar cube or colored tablet. It wasn’t until a decade later that tiny perforated paper squares known as “blotter” became the preferred way to deliver the powerful psychedelic. In this fascinating excerpt from Erik Davis’ book Blotter: The Untold Story of an Acid Medium, the journalist theorizes about why blotter proved the ideal carrier for LSD—part communion wafer, part pop-culture collectible, and part stamp granting passage to new realms. Mind-bending in its own right.

One of the most celebrated blotters of the era featured Mickey Mouse in his Fantasia guise as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. These sharply designed four-colour sheets came perfed into 100 units, each featuring their own budding rodent wizard. This was charming enough, but if you bought a gram, you’d get a red lacquered box that was also affixed with an image of Mickey, now surrounded by 17 gold stars. Inside lay a bundle of 40 sheets wrapped in a container of gold foil affixed with another image of the mouse, this time accompanied by the word ‘Sandoz’ – alerting the discerning buyer that the batch was most likely made from LSD synthesised by the original Swiss sorcerers.

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The Creator Of ‘Magic: The Gathering’ Knows Exactly Where It All Went Wrong

More than 30 years after its introduction, Magic: The Gathering continues to have a stranglehold on tabletop gamers’ attention and wallets. Nick Zarzycki’s fascinating feature doesn’t just chronicle Magic‘s history and development in a way outsiders (like yours truly) can understand, or explain the economics behind its continuing evolution. Most interestingly of all, it does so through the eyes of Richard Garfield, the man who designed the game to begin with—and watched it become a juggernaut only tenuously connected to his original brainchild.*

Convinced that Magic couldn’t survive by relying on its collectibility alone, Garfield thought the metagame of sports, which made it socially acceptable to spend tens of thousands of hours on a game, might save it from becoming a fad. He and Elias ended up using professional tennis—with its glitzy tournaments, rankings horserace, big fat winnings and transcendent star system—as a template for the Magic Pro Tour, which launched in 1996.

It’s easy to understand why Garfield left Wizards of the Coast a few years later: The entire history of the game sounds like a series of unending crises and social engineering experiments. But it goes even deeper than that: The more you look, the more you realize that there was never a time when Garfield wasn’t struggling to tame his creation. 

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